Aleksandr Bogdanov's Concept of Culture: From Workers' Circles to the Proletkult Movement - Sciendo
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cultural science CULTURAL SCIENCE JOURNAL 13(1), 2021
DOI: 10.2478/csj-2021-0015
Special theme section: Eisenstein, Bogdanov, and the organization of culture
Aleksandr Bogdanov’s Concept of Culture:
From Workers’ Circles to the Proletkult Movement
JUT TA SCHERRER
Ecole de hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, France; email: scherrer@ehess.fr
Commentary by DAVID ROWLEY
Keywords: proletarian culture, art, science and philosophy; Proletkult organization; proletarian
university, proletarian encyclopedia
This paper analyses the historical genesis of Aleksandr Bogdanov’s conception of proletarian
culture. In particular, the author deals with Bogdanov’s activity during his exile in Vologda,
his organization of the Vpered group, and the debates over cultural politics amongst Russian
Marxism in emigration. The systematic focus of the paper is on the concept of culture as based
on the material and non-material capacities of the comprehension and the working and living
conditions of the worker. The role of art in a system of culture is another important systematic
focus of this analysis.
In the middle of the 1890s when Aleksandr Bogdanov (Malinovskiy), still a student of medicine, was
organizing workers’ study circles in Tula, the notion of workers’ culture was rarely debated by Russian
revolutionaries and Marxists. The situation in Russia was very different from that in Germany where
social-democracy constituted already a mass party with a highly structured network of organizations
devoted to the educational and cultural tasks of the workers. Here, the term Arbeiterkultur was wide-
spread and leading social-democrats considered the party not only as a carrier of the economic and
political emancipation of the proletariat, but also as a broad working class cultural movement.1 In
general, their understanding of Arbeiterkultur was oriented towards bourgeois culture and did not
differentiate substantially between culture and way of life. Literature conceived by workers themselves
was mostly rejected, and this not because of its socialist tendencies, but because of its low aesthetic
level. In Russia, where the founding members of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party were
immediately arrested after its illegal foundation (1898), the party had to struggle for its organizational
survival.
In 1897 Bogdanov published the lectures that he had delivered at the workers’ schools in Tula as A
Short Course in Economic Science. This became the most popular textbook on Marxist political economy
and it was reedited and enlarged ten times until the 1920s. In teaching workers the basics of Marxist
political economy, Bogdanov had structured his course into questions and answers, a method which
he employed also in later courses designed for a working class public. His first teaching experience
1 The large organisational network of cultural organisations was considered as « Arbeiterbewegungskultur », see the book by Gerhard
A. Ritter with the same title.
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had made him aware of the particular effort of his worker-pupils to “connect technical and economic
phenomena with the forms of spiritual culture arising out of them, like links in a single complex
chain of development” (Bogdanov 1924: 240).2 It is exactly this observation of the specific spiritual
needs of the Russian worker in comprehending the content, the presentation and the reflection of
a given material as a totality, that constituted the starting point of what Bogdanov conceptualized
more than a decade later as ‘proletarian culture’: a culture based on the material and non-material
(spiritual) capacities and on the comprehension of the working and living conditions of the workers
themselves. In other words: not a culture derived from the hegemonial bourgeoisie and adapted to
the needs of the worker – an understanding implied by the German notion of Arbeiterkultur.
In what follows, I shall briefly show the most important steps in Bogdanov’s general understand-
ing of culture, which led to his particular conceptualization of proletarian culture. I shall not discuss
here Bogdanov’s political biography, his role in the consolidation of the Bolshevik organization and
his rivalry with Lenin. There is, however, no doubt, that Lenin’s, and even more so, Plekhanov’s rigid
conception of Marxism and, in particular, of historical materialism greatly influenced Bogdanov’s
conceptualization of an independent, hegemonial, proletarian culture.
During his periods of residence or exile in Tula, Kaluga and Vologda (1895–1904), Bogdanov
discussed with his comrades Bazarov, Skvortsov-Stepanov and Lunacharskiy what they called the
philosophical aspect of Marx’s system. As Bogdanov wrote in his preface to the third volume of
Empiriomonizm: since Marxism was not yet philosophically founded, they wanted to establish its
philosophical foundation. In Lunacharskiy’s words: they wanted to reinforce Marxism’s gnoseological
and ethical aspects independently of Plekhanov’s reduction of Marxism to the materialism of the
French encyclopaedists (Lunacharskiy 1919: 22).3 They denied from the outset that Marxism was a
system of explanation of social reality, valid for all the time. Marxism, in their opinion, ought to evolve,
progress, and be modernized with the most recent developments in science and philosophy by new,
contemporary ideas. “The tradition of Marx and Engels must remain dear to us, not in the letter, but
in its spirit” (Bogdanov 1908: 66). Bogdanov’s proposition became the epistemological postulate of
their group, which considered the empiriocriticism of Avenarius and Mach to be one of the most
important openings of Marxism to modern science. It became the foundation of Bogdanov’s system
of empiriomonism.
In Vologda, which was the meeting place of a whole colony of political exiles (among them N.A.
Berdyaev, B.V. Savinkov, A.M. Remizov, B.A. Kistyakovskiy, P.P. Rumyantsev), the group around Bogdanov
clarified its conception of materialism (‘realism’) in theoretical confrontations with the ‘idealists’, among
them, first of all, Berdyaev. The result was their collective volume Ocherki realisticheskogo mirovozzreniya
[Essays on realistic philosophy] which appeared in 1904 as an answer to the collective volume Prob-
lemy idealizma [Problems of idealism] which contained major articles by the former so called Legal
Marxists Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Frank and others and had appeared at the end of 1902 (Scherrer 1981:
113–152; Steila 1996:156–166). By a realistic worldview the group around Bogdanov understood the
rejection of any metaphysical absolute and of any pretension of absolute truth (istina) in favor of the
monistic ideal of cognition. In their collective volume they pleaded for the unity of theory and praxis,
and the question of how one should understand ‘superstructure’ which later became fundamental
for Bogdanov’s conception of culture, was addressed.
In a collection of essays published in 1905 under the title Novyy mir (New World) Bogdanov devel-
oped his concept of collectivism. What he called sobiranie cheloveka (integration of man) implied the
creative potential of each individual person in the collective. The education of the proletariat appeared
already in this context as the highest goal. Twenty years later, in 1924, in the preface to a collection
of his articles on proletarian culture Bogdanov referred to his early articles “as having already outlined
2 Quoted by Gloveli 1998: 42.
3 Lunacharskiy’s essay was written as early as 1918.
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the highest cultural type of life – the socialist type, which has its source in proletarian class culture”
(Bogdanov 1924: 10). In other words, proletarian culture contains only elements of socialist culture:
proletarian culture is socialist or collectivist culture in the process of evolution.
Bogdanov’s analysis of the failure of the revolution 1905 and his confrontation with Lenin over Bol-
shevik strategy after 1905 made it evident for him (and his comrades in ideas), that for organizational
purposes the workers needed their own intelligentsia, a rabochaya intelligentsiya (workers’ intelligentsia),
and for ideological reasons they needed to become aware of their own class-consciousness which
not only included the workers’ behaviour, thinking, and ideology, but also philosophy, science, and
the arts. In articles and pamphlets written after 1907, Bogdanov advocated the development of the
cultural hegemony of the proletariat prior to its seizure of power. In a pamphlet directed straight at
Lenin Ne nado zatemnyat’ (‘Do not obscure matters’) Bogdanov asserted that “Bolshevism is not simply
a political phenomenon, it is as much socio-cultural” (Maksimov 1909: 5). This kind of reasoning had
led Bogdanov, Gorkiy, Lunacharskiy and other left bolsheviks to the founding of two social-democratic
party schools for Russian workers which took place in Capri (August–December 1909) and Bologna
(November 1910–March 1911). In the Capri school, as Bogdanov remembered 1918 in his article
“Proletarian University“ the term proletarian culture was first openly formulated (Bogdanov 1924: 10).
All the teaching, comprising courses on political economy, socialism, trade unionism, history, philos-
ophy, literature and art sought to interpret the entire history of the activity and thought of humanity
not only from the point of view of the working being – what the worker could conceive – but even
more as a complete product of the experience of the working human being. The goal of the party
schools for workers was the development and organization of the class-consciousness of the prole-
tariat, which for Bogdanov was identical with the proletariat’s creative potential, namely proletarian
culture. Bogdanov’s recently published correspondence with Maksim Gorkiy shows to what degree
the writer as well as Lunacarskiy were involved in Bogdanov’s the conceptualization of proletarian
culture during their Capri period (Scherrer/Steila 2017).
One of the results of the Capri-school was the creation of the Vpered group, an independent
socio-cultural political faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, founded by the lec-
turers and the majority of the worker-pupils of the Capri school in defence of a ‘pure’, ‘authentic’ and
‘true’ Bolshevism, in opposition to the authoritarian individualism of Lenin’s style of leadership. In
the platform of the Vpered group, essentially drafted by Bogdanov, the notion of proletarian culture
appears for the first time as a political watchword.
Let me quote a longer passage from the platform of the Vpered group, which, significantly enough,
was taken up by Bogdanov in 1918 when pleading for a proletarian university:
“The bourgeois world, with its developed culture which has left its imprint upon modern science,
art, and philosophy, rears us imperceptibly in its fold, while the class struggle and our social ideal
draws us in the opposite direction. We should not break entirely with this culture, which is of the
fabric of history, for we can and should discover in it a powerful weapon in the struggle against this
same old world. To receive it as it is would mean conserving in ourselves this past against which the
struggle is waged. There is but one solution: to use the previous bourgeois culture to create, in order
to combat bourgeois culture, and to diffuse among the masses, a new proletarian culture: to develop
a proletarian science, reinforce authentically fraternal relations in the proletarian milieu, elaborate a
proletarian philosophy, and direct art towards the aspirations of the proletariat and its experience.
This is the only route to attaining a universal socialist education, which would avoid the innumerable
contradictions of our life and work, and which would augment considerably our forces in the struggle,
and approximate at the same time to our ideal of socialism, while elaborating more and more of its
elements in the present” (Sovremennoe polozhenie 1909/1910: 16–17).
In opposition to what Bogdanov considered to be the theoretical conservatism of Lenin and
Plekhanov (Bogdanov 1911: 29–30), the platform of Vpered group called for the attainment of the
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cultural hegemony of the proletariat alongside its political hegemony because politics formed an
organic whole with the other aspects of ideological life of society. For Bogdanov, the socialist ideal
included both political and cultural liberation. Socialism would be possible only when the proletariat
developed its own intellectual and moral awareness, which could be counter-posed to the old cultural
world (Bogdanov 1911; Sochor 1988: 185).
In an article written at the beginning of 1911 for the Vpered group, Sotsializm v nastoyashchem
(Socialism in the present day) Bogdanov developed his theory of comradely collaboration, or fraternal
union at work (tovarishcheskoe sotrudnichestvo), which bound the proletariat together at work, stim-
ulated its sense of psychological unity, of the organic consciousness of unity – in short, collectivism.
What Bogdanov termed collectivism was the psychology of the working class, its consciousness of
itself as a class. In fact, it was in the process of collective work that the fundamental type of organiza-
tion of a whole class was constituted, which made the proletariat capable of elaborating new forms
of life and thought, in brief, its culture. These fraternal and collectivist relations inside the working
collective should become the organizational base of the party as much as of the proletarian family
structure; they should serve for the elaboration of a new science, a new philosophy and a new art –
that of proletarian culture.
In 1911 Bogdanov left the Vpered group because of émigré infighting and politicking. Some of
his former comrades did not find it realistic “to create as of now on in the midst of existing society a
great proletarian culture, stronger and more structured than the decaying culture of the bourgeois
classes and immeasurably more free and creative” (Maksimov 1909: 5). In fact, a group around Alek-
sinskiy wished to revert to traditional political-economic as opposed to cultural priorities. From this
moment on Bogdanov concentrated on his theoretical work. The first result was the 92- page long
treaty Kult’urnye zadachi nashego vremeni (Cultural tasks of our time), which appeared that same year.
Drawing on his experiences in the party schools, Bogdanov elaborated here for the first time, system-
atically, the concept of proletarian culture which contained essentially all the aspects of proletarian
culture that he had conceptualized until then and which he was to develop later (Bogdanov 1911).
Here, as in other writings, Bogdanov distinguished three successive types of culture, each of which
depended on a type of organization of labour, that is, of a technological level of society in different
states of development: authoritarian culture, individualist culture, and collectivist culture.
It was the collective experience acquired during the work process that had given rise not only to
the first acquisition of technological and scientific knowledge, but also to myths, religious legends,
songs, poetry and to the classics of literature. The experiences of active man in the process of labour
were at the source of all these creations. Scholars and artists, as individuals, often of non-proletarian
origin, do no more than transcend the experience of the working collective. They are, in fact, the
conveyor belt of the collectivity. Each discovery in astronomy or physics, each literary creation like
an Othello, Hamlet, Faust, or William Tell, thus leads back to an experience of collective work. The
true creator of spiritual culture (dukhovnaya kul’tura) is not, therefore, the solitary individual with his
arbitrary act (proizvol) but the working being in the collectivity of work. The author, the creator, or
the genius is quite simply the point (tochka prilozheniya) where the creative forces of society are
concentrated in order to produce new forces through its consciousness. The author thus may be the
creator, subjectively speaking, but objectively it is society (Bogdanov 1911: 41).
Bogdanov demarcated three essential areas in which the proletariat should create for itself a cultural
system free of fetishism and individualist bourgeois norms (which were totally alienated from the social
praxis of man), morality, arts and science. As the foundation of new social norms, Bogdanov fixed on
the proletarian moral principle of fraternal solidarity (tovarishcheskaya solidarnost’), mentioned above.
The new social norms would correspond to the technical norms of work; they would be stripped of
their abstract character and would be reduced to the organizational principles of human relations.
All would depend on the needs of the collectivity, and all would be done according to its interests.
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The norms of morality, law and custom, as developed by proletarian class life, would correspond only
to their utility for the collectivity and to its social needs. It would be necessary to devise a new termi-
nology, for words like ‘law’, ‘morality’ or ‘religion’, which, as attributes of absolute authority no longer
had any meaning. At the same time, expressions like ‘proletarian morality’ or ‘proletarian right’ were
inadequate: new cultural forms necessitated new concepts. Truth was defined here by the experience
of work and by the praxis of the collective.
In like manner, the new proletarian art had to integrate experiences of the collectivity of work.
The proletariat lived its own life distinct from that of any other class; hence it needed its own art
imbued with its own feelings, aspirations and ideals. Bogdanov here energetically refuted the objec-
tions of those who held that the difficult conditions of working class existence and the still more
arduous circumstances of the social struggle could hinder its assuming responsibility for its own
art, at least as long as it was not in power. On the contrary, art organizes social experience through
living images, not only in the domain of knowledge, but even more in the domains of feelings and
wants. Since it discharges in this way an organizational function in the life of the collectivity, and
by the fact that it harmonizes the feelings and ideals of the masses, it becomes the most powerful
motor of the development and finally of the victory of the collectivity. The cohesion of the class
would become the greater by the fact of art embracing a field larger than that of economy and
polity.
In Kul’turnye zadachi nashego vremeni Bogdanov was not explicit on the forms of the new proletarian
art. “I leave this to others who are more competent than I on such questions” (Bogdanov 1911: 77). But,
from the point of view of content, he deemed it especially false and naïve to think that proletarian art
ought to describe the life of workers, their byt (forms and mode of everyday life) and their struggle. The
universe of the experiences of class, which is the object of the art of the class, is not for that reason in
the least limited; it embraces all the being and all the byt of society just as much as all of nature. The
proletariat lives alongside other classes, whether foreign or hostile, to which it is bound by numerous
threads, spiritual, economic, and social. Many of these elements had been, consciously or otherwise,
assimilated by the proletariat. And even if it combats them, they are after all a heritage of the classes
of which the proletariat is the issue: the petite bourgeoisie (meshchanstvo) and the peasantry. Now,
the more it knows these classes, their psychology, organization, and interests, the less the danger of
submitting to their cultural influences; and it will be that much easier for the proletariat to imbibe
from their culture what is useful and progressive. From the fact of the organizational function of art,
“putting into form and consolidating a definite social organization” (Bogdanov 1911: 51), proletarian
art would be able to show to workers at work, in their social struggle, and in their daily life, much of
what escapes from their consciousness in the first instance. Thus art is a constitutive element of the
consciousness of self (samosoznanie) of the proletarian class.
Since art organizes the human experience of labour, not in abstract concepts but in concrete, live
images (zhivye obrazy), it is more democratic than science, more accessible to the masses. Yet, Bogdanov
saw in the “democratization of scientific knowledge” the most urgent cultural task of the proletariat
of his time. According to him it was not a question of literacy or of the assimilation of the specialized
knowledge of distinct disciplines or of its popularization through pamphlets and public lectures, in
the manner typical of bourgeois culture, but of wide knowledge. It was a question of realizing the
“sum” of knowledge, hitherto split up in partial domains, of returning from specialization to general
experience, and, by that, to the general system of human labour. The workers needed a global and
unifying scientific explanation, which would furnish them with a general awareness of the existing
relation between the different technical methods, which they would apply with their own hands in
production, and of the different methods, social, economic, and ideological, that were important for
the organization of the class and for the fate of workers. The workers, therefore, should have access
to the systematization of the different domains of scientific experience and to transcend specialist
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discourse. Hence the idea of creating a Proletarian University (of which the schools of Capri and Bolo-
gna were the precursors) that would embrace all the fundamental sectors of science in its teaching.
It was with the same concern to systematize all the scientific experience of his time and to make
it accessible to the working class that Bogdanov returned to the project of a workers’ encyclopaedia
that had been launched during the Capri school. Just as the Great Encyclopaedia of the eighteenth
century had co-ordinated the fragmented knowledge and experience of the era of the bourgeoisie,
the new encyclopaedia would now explain the science and philosophy of labouring mankind as the
means towards the organization of the collective activity of man.
The proletarian democratization of knowledge, that is, the creation of a proletarian science and
of a proletarian philosophy was undertaken by Bogdanov in the following years in his Tektology or
Universal science of organization (Vseobshchaya organizatsionnaya nauka), the first volume of which
appeared in 1912, and in which he proposed to lay the foundation of a science which aimed to unify
the entire organizational experience of all of humanity, and to synthesize all the knowledge accu-
mulated by specialized disciplines.
In general it can be said that proletarian culture as conceived by Bogdanov before 1917 was not
‘popular culture’ or the culture of the popular masses. It was not defined by popular arts and tradi-
tions or by folklore. It had nothing to do with making the masses literate, educating them or simply
appropriating or assimilating bourgeois culture any more than with rejecting the cultural heritage. It
did not propose, either, a true aesthetics: one would search in vain for a precise aesthetic approach
in Bogdanov’s dilettantish analyses, in which the concrete content of proletarian culture remained
rather abstract. For him it was above all matter of making the proletariat conscious of what was
inherent in its “byt”, to deliver its internal culture. This was an internal comprehension of themselves:
their life, labour, feelings, emotions, ideals, attitudes, and mentality, in short, that they should acquire
a consciousness of self (samosoznanie) by appealing tirelessly to the collective will, which was for
Bogdanov the same as combative creativity. Only the elaboration of this independent culture could
guarantee to the proletariat its entire independence and autonomy.
These conditions were not fulfilled in 1917. Bogdanov did not contest the achievements of the
October revolution but he did question its socialist character, given the lack of cultural maturity of
the proletariat as a whole. During 1917 he worked in the Cultural and Educational Department of the
Moscow Soviet and between 1918 and 1921 he devoted himself to the Russian Proletarian Cultural
Educational Association or Proletkul’t which was founded in Petrograd in October 1917 and of whose
Central Committee he was a member. Here he worked together with his former comrades from the
Vpered group who had created in 1913 in Paris and Geneva under the direction of Lunacharskiy a
Circle of Proletarian Culture with P. Bessalko, M. Gerasimov, A. Gastev, F. Kalinin, P. Kerzhentsev, P. Leb-
edev- Polyanskiy and a number of proletarian poets and writers who now played a major role in the
Proletkult organization. Lunacharskiy, Commissar of Education, was at least in the beginning helpful
in protecting the Proletkult’s autonomy .
Bogdanov’s commitment to the Proletkult organization, which I cannot describe here in detail,
was based on his conviction that the key to socialism lay in the sphere of culture: unless socialism
meant cultural liberation, it meant very little. In the pages of Proletarskaya kul’tura, Proletkult’s main
journal to whose editorial board Bolgdanov belonged, he argued that the Proletkult organization
should be open only to the most highly qualified workers of the leading industrial sectors as well as
to the most mature and active workers. Only they could organize the cultural and ideological lead-
ership, the hegemony of the political bloc over the petty bourgeois and peasant culture produced
by the broad masses. Just as the party could not accept that its political line would be determined
by the least conscious workers, Bogdanov argued, so also the Proletkult could not admit that its
cultural line should be determined by the least conscious workers. The Proletkult should become,
by analogy with the party, an organization for the cultural vanguard of the working class and also
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represent in Bogdanov’s terms, a sort of “laboratory of the pure proletarian ideology” (Bogdanov 1919:
26–29). Bogdanov’s particular understanding of culture brought him again into opposition to Lenin
who argued, as is generally known, that in the particular conditions of Russia’s backwardness a true
bourgeois culture should suffice as the basis of a workers’ education.
As before 1917, Bogdanov was less interested in concrete, applied aesthetics and forms of pro-
letarian art, but much more in theoretical and organizational questions of the Proletkult. As before,
proletarian culture meant for him, in the first instance, the independent creativity of the proletariat to
acquire its own consciousness. For the socialization of science, the core issue of proletarian culture, a
Proletarian University, a proletarian encyclopaedia and a proletarian library for scientific-philosophical
works were founded, inspired by the experiences acquired in the Capri and Bologna party schools.
Among Bogdanov’s numerous writings on behalf of the Proletkult, none was written in support of
the maximalist tendency of some of the Proletkult representatives such as V. T. Kirillov who wished
to abandon the entire cultural heritage of former generations – a reproach made of Bogdanov by
Lenin and subsequent Soviet historiography until its very end, with the intention to discredit him.
It was certainly the merit of Proletkult and of Bogdanov to have posed the question of culture as
central for the revolution. But Bogdanov and the Proletkult were unable to mobilize for their goal the
proletarian vanguard and to develop an independent Proletkult aesthetics.
In general, it can be said that Bogdanov, “like the early anthropologists understood culture in the
broadest sense, as encompassing tools, means of cooperation, speech, knowledge, art, customs, laws,
ethics and so on – in other words, all the products, material and nonmaterial, of human labour” (Sochor
1988: 68). Mostly, however, he referred to culture in the narrower sense, what he called ‘spiritual culture’,
which included worldviews, artistic creativity, aesthetics, and political relations. He used culture in this
sense synonymously with ideology or science of ideas which he defined as the social consciousness
of people (Bogdanov 1911: 3; Sochor 1988: 68). Bogdanov’s principal idea was that culture in its many
forms, whether speech, knowledge, customs, or art had an internal structure, an implicit organizational
function. Culture plays a real, practical role in society, an organizational role. Rather than treat culture
as an epiphenomenon, as implied in Marx’s use of the term superstructure, Bogdanov defined culture
as a type of infrastructure in society with its own specific role (Sochor 1988: 70).
There is no doubt that independently from his more praxis oriented conceptualization of prole-
tarian culture Bogdanov developed also a more anthropological understanding of culture in works
such as Filosofiya zhivogo opyta, Nauka ob obshchestvennom soznanii and Tektologiya. But this would
be another topic of reflection.
Commentary by David Rowley
What particularly strikes me in Jutta Scherrer’s article is the evidence she provides for appreciating the
unity of theory and practice in Bogdanov’s work. The fundamental question for a historical materialist
is how being determines consciousness, and Bogdanov answered it by asserting that the technol-
ogy of production is primary, and that cognitive and normative ideological forms (including art) are
secondary (Bogdanov 2020: 332). He further asserted that the fundamental class division in society
is between organizers (those who master the technology of the era and who are in charge of pro-
duction) and implementers (those who carry out the directives of the organisers). Bogdanov explains
the specialization of bourgeois science, the dualism of bourgeois philosophy, and the absolutism
of bourgeois morality as consequences of the role the bourgeoisie played in organizing capitalist
production.
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Jutta Scherrer
The transition to socialism, according to Bogdanov, will be the consequence of a change in the
technology of production – that is, the transition to production by self-regulating automatic machines.
By overseeing such machines, workers will become organizers as well as implementers, and ‘the unity
of cognitive methods (the highest form of monism) that is developing will make human thinking an
increasingly systematic and harmonious system’ (Bogdanov 2022: 137). This new type of thinking will
lead to collectivism – or the ‘integration of man’ – as Scherrer points out.
Bogdanov’s unity of theory and practice encompasses the idea that it is because of their relation
to the technology of production that proletarians must be the leaders in the creation of proletarian
(socialist, collectivist) culture. As Scherrer shows, at every stage of Bogdanov’s development of the idea
of proletarian culture, workers are the prime movers: during his exile in Tula, Bogdanov’s worker-pupils
led him to ‘connect technical and economic phenomena with the forms of spiritual culture arising
out of them’; the Party Schools at Capri and Bologna were intended to foster the self-development of
proletarians; and finally, ‘the Proletkult organization would be open only to the most highly qualified
workers of the leading industrial sectors’.
Bogdanov had anticipated this idea in The Cultural Tasks of Our Time, when he presented the idea
of the Proletarian University (and the Proletarian Encyclopaedia, which will arise from it and which
will embody the ultimate expression of the proletarian world view). The new university will not be
open to children fresh from (bourgeois) high school and with no experience in productive labour.
Instead, students of the “New University” will “already be essentially adults with serious experience in
the sphere of labour and social struggle …. Such ‘students’ will be real comrades of their ‘professors’
and in their turn will lead the professors in fulfilling their collective-creative task” (Bogdanov 1911: 70).
Bogdanov’s confidence in the ability of proletarians to create proletarian culture was the logical
consequence of his belief that being determines consciousness.
References
Bogdanov, AA. 1908. Priklyuchenie odnoj filosofskoj shkoly. St. Petersburg.
Bogdanov, AA. 1911. Kul’turnye zadachi nashego vremeni. Moskva: S. Dorovatovskiy and
A. Charushnikov.
Bogdanov, AA. 1919. “Plan organizatsii Proletkul’ta”. Proletarkaya kul’tura. No. 6 (February). – 1924.
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Authors information
Jutta Scherrer is Director of research at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris since
1980. She is teaching Russian history and is particularly engaged with analysis of socio-cultural, phil-
osophical and political phenomena of the 19th and 20th centuries. She has published extensively on
Russian intelligentsia, Russian Marxism, Russian orthodoxy and religious philosophy. Her more recent
research deals with identity construction in post-Soviet Russia, historical memory and « politics of
history ». She was during many years member of the scientific council of the Institute for the Study of
Eastern Europe in Leipzig (GWZO), of the German Historical Museum in Berlin and the German-Russian
Museum in Berlin-Karlshorst.
David G. Rowley (PhD, University of Michigan) is Emeritus Professor of History, University of Wiscon-
sin-Platteville. He has published several articles on Alexander Bogdanov, and he is co-editor with
Evgeni Pavlov of the Brill/Historical Materialism “Bogdanov Library”. Three of his translations for the
Library have been published so far: The Philosophy of Living Experience (2016), Empiriomonism (2020),
and Toward a New World: Articles and Essays, 1901–1906 (2022).
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Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution 4.0
International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, andreproduction in any medium, provided the original
author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Cultural Science Journal is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Tallinn University and Sciendo.
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